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<TITLE>Song of Myself - Walt Whitman</TITLE>
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<FONT SIZE="+2" COLOR="#00AEFF"><STRONG><EM>Song of Myself</EM></STRONG></FONT><BR>
<FONT SIZE="+1"><STRONG>Walt Whitman</STRONG></FONT>
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<BLOCKQUOTE>
<CENTER>1</CENTER>
I celebrate myself, and sing myself,<BR>
And what I assume you shall assume,<BR>
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
<P>
I loafe and invite my soul,<BR>
I lean and loafe at me ease observing a spear of summer grass.
<P>
My tongue, every atom of my blood, form'd from this soil, this air,<BR>
Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their parents the same,<BR>
I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin,<BR>
Hoping to cease not till death.
<P>
Creeds and schools in abeyance,<BR>
Retiring back a while sufficed at what they are, but never forgotten,<BR>
I harbor for good or bad, I permit to speak at every hazard,<BR>
Nature without check with original energy.
<P>
<CENTER>2</CENTER>
Houses and rooms are full of perfumes, the shelves are crowded with perfumes,<BR>
I breathe the fragrance myself and know it and like it,<BR>
The distillation would intoxicate me also, but I shall not let it.
<P>
The atmosphere is not a perfume, it has no taste of the distillation, it is odorless,<BR>
It is for my mouth forever, I am in love with it,<BR>
I will go to the bank by the wood and become undisguised and naked,<BR>
I am mad for it to be in contact with me.<BR>
The smoke of my own breath,<BR>
Echoes, ripples, buzz'd whispers, love-root, silk-thread, crotch and vine,<BR>
My respiration and inspiration, the beating of my heart, the passing of blood and air through my lungs,<BR>
The sniff of green leaves and dry leaves, and of the shore and dark-color'd sea-rocks, and of hay in the barn,<BR>
The sound of the belch'd words of my voice loss'd to the eddies of the wind,<BR>
A few light kisses, a few embraces, a reaching around of arms,<BR>
The play of shine and shade on the trees as the supple boughs wag,<BR>
The delight alone or in the rush of the streets, or along the fields and hill-sides,<BR>
The feeling of health, the full-noon trill, the song of me rising from bed and meeting the sun.
<P>
Have you reckon'd a thousand acres much? have you reckon'd the earth much?<BR>
Have you practis'd so long to learn to read?<BR>
Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems?
<P>
Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems,<BR>
You shall possess the good of the earth and sun, (there are millions of suns left,)<BR>
You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in books,<BR>
You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me,<BR>
You shall listen to all sides and filter them from your self.
<P>
<CENTER>3</CENTER>
I have heard what the talkers were talking, the talk of the beginning and the end,<BR>
But I do not talk of the beginning or the end.
<P>
There was never any more inception than there is now,<BR>
Nor any more youth or age than there is now,<BR>
And will never be any more perfection than there is now,<BR>
Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.
<P>
Urge and urge and urge,<BR>
Always the procreant urge of the world.
<P>
Out of the dimness opposite equals advance, always substance and increase, always sex,<BR>
Always a knit of identity, always distinction, always a breed of life.
<P>
To elaborate is no avail, learn'd and unlearn'd feel that it is so.
<P>
Sure as the most certain sure, plumb in the uprights, well entretied, braced in the beams,<BR>
Stout as a horse, affectionate, haughty, electrical,<BR>
I and this mystery here we stand.
<P>
Clear and sweet is my soul, and clear and sweet is all that is not my soul.
<P>
Lack one lacks both, and the unseen is proved by the seen,<BR>
Till that becomes unseen and receives proof in its turn.
<P>
Showing the best and dividing it from the worst age vexes age,<BR>
Knowing the perfect fitness and equanimity of things, while they discuss I am silent, and go bathe and admire myself.
<P>
Welcome is every organ and attribute of me, and of any man hearty and clean,<BR>
Not an inch nor particle of an inch is vile, and none shall be less familiar than the rest.
<P>
I am satisfied--I see, dance, laugh, sing;<BR>
As the hugging and loving bed-fellow sleeps at my side through the night, and withdraws at the peep of the day with stealthy thread,<BR>
Leaving me baskets cover'd with white towels swelling the house with their plenty,<BR>
Shall I postpone my acceptation and realization and scream at my eyes,<BR>
That they turn from gazing after and down the road,<BR>
And forthwith cipher and show me to a cent,<BR>
Exactly the value of one and exactly the value of two, and which is ahead?
<P>
<CENTER>4</CENTER>
Trippers and askers surround me,<BR>
People I meet, the effect upon me of my early life or the ward and city I live in, or the nation,<BR>
The latest dates, discoveries, inventions, societies, authors old and new,<BR>
My dinner, dress, associates, looks, compliments, dues,<BR>
The real or fancied indifference of some man or woman I love,<BR>
The sickness of one of my folks or of myself, or ill-doing or loss or lack of money, or depressions or exaltations,<BR>
Battles, the horrors of fratricidal war, the fever of doubtless news, the fitful events;<BR>
These come to me days and nights and go from me again,<BR>
But they are not the Me myself.
<P>
Apart from the pulling and hauling stands what I am,<BR>
Stands amused, complacent, compassionating, idle, unitary,<BR>
Looks down, is erect, or bends an arm on an impalpable certain rest,<BR>
Looking with side-curved head curious what will come next,<BR>
Both in and out of the game and watching and wondering at it.
<P>
Backward I see in my own days where I sweated through fog with linguists and contenders,<BR>
I have no mockings or arguments, I witness and wait.
<P>
<CENTER>5</CENTER>
I believe in you my soul, the other I am must not abase itself to you,<BR>
And you must not be abased to the other.
<P>
Loafe with me on the grass, loose the stop from your throat,<BR>
Not words, not music or rhyme I want, not custom or lecture, not even the best,<BR>
Only the lull I like, the hum of your valved voice.
<P>
I mind how once we lay such a transparent summer morning,<BR>
How you settled your head athwart my hips and gently turn'd over upon me,<BR>
And parted the shirt from my bosom-bone, and plunged your tongue to my bare-stript heart,<BR>
And reach'd till you felt my beard and reach'd till you held my feet.
<P>
Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and knowledge that pass all the argument of the 
earth,<BR>
And I know that the hand of God is the promise of my own,<BR>
And I know that the spirit of God is the brother of my own,<BR>
And that all the men ever born are also my brothers, and the women my sisters and lovers,<BR>
And that a kelson of the creation is love,<BR>
And limitless are leaves stiff or drooping in the fields,<BR>
And brown ants in the little wells beneath them,<BR>
And mossy scabs of the worm fence, heap'd scores, elder, mullein and poke-weed.
<P>
<CENTER>6</CENTER>
A child said <EM>What is the grass?</EM> fetching it to me with full hands;<BR>
How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he.
<P>
I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven.
<P>
Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord,<BR>
A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropt,<BR>
Bearing the owner's name someway in the corners, that we may see and remark, and say 
<EM>Whose?</EM>
<P>
Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic,<BR>
And it means, Sproating alike in broad zones and narrow zones,<BR>
Growing among black folks as among white,<BR>
Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff, I give them the same, I receive them the same.
<P>
And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves.
<P>
Tenderly will I use you curling grass,<BR>
It may be you transpire from the breats of young men,<BR>
It may be if I had known them I would have loved them,<BR>
If my be you are from old people, or from offspring taken soon out of their mothers' laps,<BR>
</BLOCKQUOTE>
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